Chapter One
There are people who like change. There are even a few who
thrive on it. That's not me. If it were, I wouldn't have
reupholstered my ten-year-old recliner, and I wouldn't
resole my shoes until they're half-a-size smaller than
they were to begin with. When I move into a house or, as
in the present case, into a high-rise condo, I'd better
like the way I arrange the furniture the first time
because that's the way it's going to stay until it's time
to move someplace else. In fact, my aversion to change
probably also accounts for my Porsche 928. George
Washington's axe, with two new handles and a new head,
probably doesn't have much to do with our first president.
And my replacement Porsche doesn't have a lot of
connection to Anne Corley, the lady who gave me the
original. Still it's easier to hang on to the one I have
now out of sentimental reasons than it is to admit that I
just don't care to make the switch to a different car.
In other words, I'm a great believer in the status
quo. It also explains why, on the Monday morning after
Beverly Piedmont and I drove home from Lake Chelan, I came
back to work expecting things at Seattle PD to be just the
way they had been. And to begin with, there was no outward
sign of change. Sue Danielson and I walked into our
cubicle to discover a yellow Post-it note attached to the
monitor of the desktop computer we share when we're in the
office as opposed to the laptops we're supposed to use in
the field.
"See me," the note said. "My office. Nine sharp."
There was no signature. On the fifth floor of the
Public SafetyBuilding, no signature was necessary. Captain
Lawrence Powell has never made any bones about hating
electronics in general and computers in particular. His
idea of surfing the net is to go around the Homicide Squad
slapping Post-it notes on every computer in sight.
Sue sighed. "What have we done now?" she asked,
glancing at her watch. At 8:02, there was no reason to
hurry to Larry Powell's fishbowl of an office. If we were
going to be chewed out for something, I'm of the opinion
later is always better than earlier.
"Who knows?" I said. "But remember, whatever it was, I
was out of town most of last week, so it can't be my
fault."
"You'd be surprised," Sue returned.
Sitting down at the desk I removed the note and turned
on the computer. In typical bureaucratic fashion, when the
department finally decided to create a local-area network
and go on-line, they bought computers from the lowest
possible bidder. As a consequence, they take for damned
ever to boot up. I tapped my fingers impatiently and
stared at the cyberspace egg timer sitting interminably in
the middle of an otherwise blank blue screen.
"Probably has something to do with that well-done
smoker who set herself on fire last Tuesday," I suggested.
"Oh," Sue said. "That's right. I forgot. You missed
it."
I didn't like the sound of that "Oh." My antenna went
up. "Missed what?" I asked.
"Marian Rockwell's preliminary report."
Marian Rockwell is one of the Seattle Fire
Department's crack arson investigators. "Agnes Ferman's
death is no longer being considered accidental," Sue
continued. "Marian found residue of an accelerant on Agnes
Ferman's bedding."
Smokers die in their beds all the time—in their beds
or on their sofas. As far as I was concerned, arson seemed
like a real stretch.
"What did she do, dump her lighter fluid while she was
refilling her Zippo? Right. The next thing you're going to
tell me is that Agnes Ferman is Elvis Presley's long-lost
sister."
Sue scowled at me. "Don't pick a fight with me about
it, Beau," she said. "I'm just telling you what Marian
told me. You can believe it or not. It's no skin off my
teeth either way. It's all there in the report I wrote up
Friday morning."
Squabbling with my partner in the face of an imminent
and possibly undeserved chewing out from the captain more
or less took the blush off the morning. Up till then, it
had seemed like a fairly decent Monday.
"So what else did you do while I was gone?" I asked.
"On Ferman? Not much. I counted and inventoried all the
money and ..."
"Money? What money?"
"The three hundred some-odd thousand in cash we found
hidden in a refrigerator in Agnes Ferman's garage. I had
planned on starting the neighborhood canvass and talking
to her next of kin, but counting that much cash takes
time. Agnes has a sister who lives up around Marysville
and a brother and sister-in-law in Everett. That's about
all I know so far. I haven't had a chance to track any of
them down. The same goes for neighbors. Marian interviewed
some of them—the one who reported the fire—but so far
nobody's really canvassed the neighborhood."
Cash or no cash, homicides come with a built-in
timetable. A murder that isn't solved within forty-eight
hours tends to not be solved at all. As with any rule,
there are exceptions, but the chances are, the longer a
case remains unsolved after that deadline, the worse the
odds are that it will ever be cleared. Next-of-kin and
neighbor interviews are where investigations usually
start. The fact that no interviews had taken place so far
wasn't good. Furthermore, since my whole purpose in life
is to see that killers don't get away with murder, I
wasn't the least bit pleased by the seemingly unnecessary
delay.
"Great," I fumed. "That's just great. Our case goes
stale while all those concerned stand around twiddling
their thumbs."
Sue shot me an icy glare. "I don't suppose you watched
the news when you were east of the mountains."
Watching television—particularly television news—isn't
my idea of a good time. I seldom watch TV on either side
of the mountains. "As a matter of fact, I didn't. Should I
have?" I asked irritably.
"For your information, all hell broke loose the minute
you left town, including two drive-bys on Wednesday, a
fatality vehicular accident under the convention center in
the middle of Thursday-afternoon rush hour, and a
homicide/suicide over in West Seattle on Friday morning.
Add in a couple of assault cases and some role-playing
ghouls in Seward Park and you can understand how poor old
Agnes might have taken a backseat."
"Role-playing ghouls?" I asked. "What's that all
about?"
"Funny you should ask," Sue told me. "That case
happens to be ours, as well."
"What case?"
"The ghouls. About three o'clock Wednesday morning
someone called to report a body in Seward Park. Supposedly
the park is closed overnight, but it was hopping that
night. When uniforms showed up, they found the place full
of Generation X'ers dressed up like vampires and zombies
and acting out some kind of role-playing game. Your basic
Halloween in April. One of the guests freaked out when
they stumbled on some non-make-believe human remains. He
went home and called the cops. So since the Haz-Mat guys
had the Ferman neighborhood shut down most of Wednesday, I
got sent out to crawl around Seward Park looking for more
bones instead of starting on the Ferman interviews."
By then I had finished calling up the file and was
starting to scan it. The only words that penetrated my
consciousness were vampire and Haz-Mat.
"Wait a minute," I said, turning away from the
screen. "What does Halloween revisited have to do with the
Hazardous Materials Unit?"
Sue nailed me with an exasperated glare. "Either
listen or read," she told me. "Obviously you're incapable
of doing both at once."
Sue Danielson is not short-tempered. Anything but.
Between the two of us, I'm the one who's the grouser. But
her tone of voice combined with a chilly stare warned me
that I had blundered into risky territory.
"You talk; I'll listen," I said. "Let's start with Haz-
Mat."
"I was about to head out to Bitter Lake on Wednesday
morning to start interviewing neighbors when Marian
Rockwell called and told me not to bother because she was
in the process of evacuating the whole neighborhood. It
seems she had just taken a peek inside Ferman's detached
garage. According to her, it's a miracle the whole place
didn't go up in a ball of flame during the fire on Tuesday
morning. If it had, it might have taken half the
neighborhood with it."
"What was in it, dynamite?"
"Not quite, but close enough. Old oxygen and acetylene
tanks and welding equipment along with an old Plymouth
van. One whole wall was stacked floor-to-ceiling with
deteriorating cans of paint and paint thinner, all of
which would have burned like crazy if the garage had
happened to catch fire. It was such a mess that it took
the Haz-Mat guys almost the whole day to clear the place
out. There was an old refrigerator in there, too. Sitting
in the back with its face to the wall. That's where they
found the money.
"Like I said before, it turns out to be a little over
three hundred thou," Sue told me. "Most of it in hundred-
dollar bills. I had been sent to work the Seward Park
case, but once they located the money, Marian wanted me to
come take charge of it. Which is how we get to have both
cases—Seward Park and Agnes Ferman. One old and one new."
"So where do you suppose all this money came from? How
much was it again?"
"Three hundred eleven thousand to be exact, plus
change. Agnes must not have liked banks very much. As I
said, it took most of Thursday to inventory it all and
record the serial numbers. It's in hundreds mostly. Some
of them have been circulated, but the majority haven't.
The better part of a quarter of a million came straight
from the U.S. Mint sometime after 1973 and before 1990.
Since about 1993, incoming cash slowed to a trickle."
"You think that big chunk has been in the refrigerator
the whole time?"
"Maybe not in the refrigerator, but the bills have
definitely been out of circulation. A lot of them are
still banded with consecutive serial numbers."
"And the earliest serial numbers date from the mid-
seventies?"
Sue nodded. "Right. They're old bills, but they look
brand new. Meanwhile, knowing there was that much money at
stake, Marian Rockwell decided maybe it was premature to
declare the fire accidental. And what do you know! As soon
as she went looking for an accelerant, she found it."
"With Agnes Ferman dead, who does the money go to?" I
asked.
"No idea. So far there's no sign of a will. My guess
is we're not going to find one."
"Makes sense," I said. "If Agnes didn't like banks,
she probably didn't like lawyers, either."
"Which means we need to talk to both the brother and
sister," Sue said.
"ASAP," I agreed. "Now what about Seward Park? Any
chance the Generation X'ers did the deed?"
"No," Sue said. "The bones look like they've been out
in the elements for a long time—longer than most of those
asshole kids have been on earth. All we've found so far
are skeletal remains. A femur here and a tibia there. Not
enough for even a partial autopsy, and no sign at all of
cause of death. Over the weekend some Explorer Scouts were
supposed to go over the whole area inch by inch. So far,
though, I haven't heard what if anything more they found.
It could be some long-dead guy whose bones washed up
during last winter's floods, or it could be a previously
undiscovered victim of the Green River Killer. Until
someone in Doc Baker's office has a chance to tell us
otherwise, however, we have orders to treat it as a
possible homicide."
"In other words," I added, "it looks like we're back
to business as usual with everyone working multiple
cases."
"For the time being," Sue said.
For a while I had enjoyed the laid-back, eight-hour-a-
day pace of chasing cold cases, but now the novelty had
worn off. I was bored. "Good," I said. "It's about time."
While the printer was spitting out a hard copy of
Sue's report, I continued to scan the screen. The date of
birth listed on Agnes Ferman's driver's license was within
one month of my mother's. Had I not spent so much time
with my grandmother the previous week, that's a detail
that I might have simply glossed over. As it was, however,
it struck me as significant somehow. It made me want to
know more about the dead woman. And her killer.
Dying of smoking in bed implies a certain amount of
self-destruction, a kind of willfulness. It's the sort of
death that doesn't evoke a lot of sympathy. Like dying of
a drug overdose or booze. People pretty much shrug their
shoulders and say "Who cares?"
On the other hand, dying in bed because of an arson-
related fire makes the victim doubly victimized. After
all, in the Saturday afternoon Westerns I used to watch at
the old Baghdad Theater in Ballard, the Indians never
attacked until after dawn. Staging a surprise attack in
the middle of the night was definitely not okay. Not
honorable. Killing a defenseless, sleeping victim wasn't
considered fair play in those old movies, and it didn't
seem fair in modern-day Seattle, either—no matter how much
money the old girl had hidden in her firetrap of a garage.
Lost in the report, I had gone through Marian
Rockwell's Haz-Mat part of the story and was just getting
to the inventory of Agnes Ferman's stash of money when Sue
sliced through my concentration.
"Time to go," she said. "It's almost nine. You know
what'll happen if we're late."
Larry Powell's all-glass office allows the captain to
keep his finger on the pulse of his troops at all times.
Meticulously clean glass makes for an unobstructed view of
the status board behind Sergeant Watkins' desk. By reading
that the captain can tell at all times which teams of
detectives are assigned to which cases. The check-in board
next to the status board lets him know who's in, who's
out, and when they're expected back. Coming around Watty's
cluttered desk, I was surprised to see the Fishbowl
crammed wall-to-wall with people—fellow members of the
detective division who populate the fifth floor of the
Public Safety Building.
"If this is going to be an ass chewing," I whispered
in an aside to Sue, "it's a world-class, group-grope
event. No one on the floor is exempt."
Sue shot me a stifling glance that effectively
silenced me while we wormed our way into the crowd.
Surprisingly enough, we weren't the last to arrive. As
more people squeezed into too-little space we found
ourselves mashed into the far corner of the office with
our backs right up against the glass partition. About the
time I figured no one else could possibly wedge himself
into the room, someone else showed up—Detective Paul
Kramer.
Kramer has never been high on my list of favorite
people. In January, he had broken his leg and had been off
on medical leave for a while. When he came back from
disability still on crutches, the brass took him off
homicide and dragged him upstairs to work on some kind of
special project for the chief. Until he shoehorned his way
into Powell's office that morning, I hadn't seen the man
in weeks and that's exactly how I like it. A little bit of
Kramer goes a very long way.
"All right, folks," the captain said. "It looks like
everybody's here, so let's get started. I'd like to keep
this brief so all of you can get back to work as soon as
possible. Most of you have met my wife, Marcia. Some of
you may be aware that in the past few months she's been
dealing with a series of health difficulties. At first we
thought it was some kind of leg or back injury. It turns
out, however, that it's a good deal more serious than
that. Last Wednesday, we finally received confirmation of
her preliminary diagnosis. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—
ALS. Marcia has Lou Gehrig's disease."
There was an audible gasp from some of the people in
the room, but Captain Powell plunged on without
acknowledgment. "From what we've been able to learn so
far, this is a neurological disease in which, over time,
various limbs and organs lose their ability to function
and become paralyzed. From diagnosis on there's a life
expectancy of approximately three to seven years. Although
there may be some treatments that can slow the progression
of the disease, at this time there is no cure.
"Right now, Marcia's symptoms are little more than an
inconvenience, but there's no telling how long that will
last or how fast the disease will progress. Bearing that
in mind and knowing that our time to do things together is
severely limited, I'm pulling the pin. As of Friday, I
have submitted my letter of resignation to Chief Rankin.
This morning, he has accepted it, with regret, as of May
fifteenth. With accumulated sick leave and vacation time,
today is my last day on the job. That's probably just as
well since I'm not very good at long goodbyes or short
ones either, for that matter.
"I want you all to know that I'm very proud of you.
You're a hell of a team, and I'm going to miss you each
and every one." He paused long enough to glance around the
room. There was no mistaking the moisture in his eyes—or
in anybody else's, either.
"So, that's how it is. You've given me your
unqualified support, and I expect you to do the same for
my successor, whoever that may be. Naturally, with so
little advance warning, you can understand that there have
been no firm decisions yet as to who will be occupying
this desk."
I happened to glance at Paul Kramer just as Larry said
that. The look on his face was an open book. I've seen the
same unqualified yearning on little kids pressing their
noses against the glass shields protecting containers of
ice cream at Baskin Robbins.
Kramer? I thought. Captain Paul Kramer? Are you
kidding? No frigging way!
"So, that's all then," Larry was saying. "The people
in benefits have assured us that between my insurance and
Marcia's we shouldn't have too many worries on that score.
For now we're going to be busy doing some of the things we
always expected to do in retirement—starting with a
Caribbean cruise. We leave for Miami this Thursday
afternoon. During the summer we expect to get in our motor
home and do some traveling around the States. We're going
to go as far and as fast as we can. When we can't go
anymore, then we'll stop. So, wish us well." He paused
again and then managed a shadow of a grin. "And don't let
the door hit your butts on the way out."
People breathed again. Tension in the room—which had
been almost palpable—let up a little. A few of the old-
timers managed a chuckle at hearing the familiar phrase.
Larry Powell never was a believer in long, drawn-out
meetings. When it was over, it was over. That was the way
he often ended his briefings—by pointing to the door and
sending us on our way. This time, though, people didn't
leave right away. We dribbled out one at a time, like
mourners leaving a church after a funeral, with each man
or woman pausing long enough to mumble a few words of
comfort and encouragement and to shake Larry's hand.
Because of the way we had been crowded into the far
corner of the room, Sue and I were among the last to
leave.
"Sorry," she said. "I'm so sorry."
Larry nodded. "Thanks," he said. "I know."
With that, Sue left. Then it was just Captain Powell
and I standing facing one another across the smooth
surface of his desk. "I don't know what to say," I began.
The captain sighed. "You don't need to say anything,
Beau," he said. "Of all the people in this room, you
probably know more about what's coming down the road than
anyone here, me included. You've lost two wives instead of
one. How do you get through it? How did you?"
Anne Corley was a long time ago, but it was only a few
months since my ex-wife, Karen, had died of cancer. I had
a pretty good idea of how much Larry was hurting right at
that moment, but I also knew what he was feeling now was
nothing compared to what he'd feel before long. It would
get worse, much, much worse, before it got better.
I reached out and shook his hand. "You do it one day
at a time," I told him. "And you make the most of every
minute you have."
"Thanks," he said. "We intend to."
On my way back to our cubicle, I noticed there was
none of the usual banter drifting from the doors I passed.
It was as if Larry Powell's unexpected farewell address
had hit all of us where we lived. Knowing about Marcia
Powell's illness reminded us, all too disturbingly, of our
own mortality.
Being partners is a whole lot like being married—with
none of the side benefits. When I stepped into the
cubicle, Sue glanced at me over her shoulder and gave
me "the look"—one that was unmistakable to any man who's
ever been married. Are you okay? it said. Do you want to
talk about it?
Naturally the answer I should have given to both
questions was No, I'm not okay and Yes, I need to talk
about it. But I didn't. Instead, I walked over to the
computer and switched it off. "Come on, Sue," I
said. "Let's get the hell out of here."
"Where are we going?" Sue asked.
"We're going to do our jobs and try to figure out who
the hell turned poor old Agnes Ferman into a shish kebab."